The price of defeat

This substantial and fascinating book looks at the aftermath of the Third Reich in the German-speaking regions of Europe. The Allies ‘came in hate’, their memories of Nazi atrocities refreshed by the liberation of concentration camps like Auschwitz, where the Soviets found more than a million items of clothing, and Buchenwald, where the piles of corpses made the ferocious General Patton physically sick. The Archbishop of Cologne protested in 1945 that ‘the whole nation is not guilty, and that many thousand children, old people and mothers are wholly innocent and it is they who now bear the brunt.’ Women in particular suffered at the hands of the victors. When the Russians erected a soaring column surmounted by a Red Army soldier in Vienna in August 1945, he became known as ‘the unknown rapist’. But despite their atrocities the Russians could show kindness to children. Nor were they the only victors capable of brutality. The French, who seemed like ‘perfumed Russians’, raped thousands of women in Stuttgart. There were also hundreds of rape charges against the American army, though Giles MacDonogh does not give a figure for those against the British. Like the other victors, British soldiers looted watches and other valuables, including the magnificent gem-encrusted baton of Hitler’s successor Admiral Doenitz. Nor could the British hide their sense of superiority over the beaten enemy, so some Germans in our zone felt they belonged to a colonised people. All the same, the number of prisoners of war who died in British custody was strikingly low compared to their Allies. According to one German witness, British soldiers were the ‘quietest, slowest and most understanding’ of the victors.